This thesis is a study of five retrospective childhoods; namely, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes: A Memoir, Harry Crews' A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Wole Soyinka's Ake: The Years of Childhood, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, and Kyoko Mori's The Dream of Water: A Memoir. I refer to them as retrospective childhoods in order to collapse the distinction between the memoir and autobiography, because, as Philipe Lejeune points out, as soon as the author allows the child to speak with his own voice, all autobiographical texts regardless of labels, are seen to